Regions Hospital in St. Paul expressed remorse Wednesday, April 17, after a stillborn baby's body was wrapped in linen in its morgue and accidentally sent to a commercial laundry.

The Red Wing, Minn., laundry found the male stillborn, which likely weighed about 1 pound at 22 weeks' gestation, on Tuesday morning.

"We're deeply saddened and troubled that this happened and want to make sure that it never happens again," Chris Boese, the hospital's chief nursing officer, said at a news conference.

About 2,500 babies are born each year at the hospital, with perhaps two stillborns a month, Boese said.

She said she wasn't aware of a past case of a baby's remains accidentally being discarded at the hospital.

Around the U.S., such cases are rare but not unprecedented.

"It's hard to understand how it happened," said Cathi Lammert, president of Pregnancy Loss and Infant Death Alliance, who was in Minneapolis for an international conference on the topic starting Thursday.

"We have to be very careful with those little ones. They're very tiny. I'm sure it's an error the hospital really feels very bad about it," said Lammert, a nurse from St. Charles, Mo.

Families that experience a stillbirth are given the choice of making their own arrangements or allowing Regions to work with community groups that take care of the burial or cremation.

In this week's case, Boese said patient privacy laws prevented her from saying whether the baby's family had expressed a preference.

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Scott Smith, a spokesman with the Minnesota Health Department, said the department didn't have information to comment specifically on the Regions case.

But, he said, state and federal sanctions against a hospital generally happen only if it's found a hospital is violating regulations and doesn't take corrective action.

The Regions incident would not fall under the state's adverse-health events reporting law, which covers specific medical errors, Smith said.

An anonymous caller notified Red Wing police Tuesday that a baby's body had been found at Crothall Laundry, Police Chief Roger Pohlman said. By the time officers arrived, Regions personnel already had retrieved the body, he said.

Red Wing is about 45 miles southeast of St. Paul.

Witnesses told police the stillborn's body was found in a sheet, Pohlman said. They said it was diapered and had an ankle bracelet.

Police were later told the baby died April 4, he said.

The Health Department didn't have a fetal death report for Regions Hospital for that date. State law requires they be filed within five days of the death of a baby of 20 or more weeks' gestation, Scott said, but he said it's not unusual for a hospital to take more time to file a complete report.

Boese said it's not uncommon for remains to be in the hospital's morgue for a length of time. She said the hospital learned the body was missing when contacted by the laundry.

The hospital immediately collected the remains "and secured them according to proper procedures," Regions said in a statement.

The linen that the remains were wrapped in had been mistaken for laundry to be sent for cleaning, according to the statement.

"We have processes in place that should have prevented this but did not," Boese said. "We are working to identify the gap in our system and to make sure this does not happen again."

A Regions spokesman said the stillborn's family was notified; however, the hospital declined to identify them, citing privacy reasons.

Candy McVicar, who delivered her daughter Grace stillborn in 2001 and started the Missing GRACE Foundation in Rogers, said the contact with the baby's parents must have been "very devastating, really heartbreaking" for them. They put a post on the group's Facebook page Wednesday, asking people to pray for them.

There has been growing sensitivity to grieving over stillbirths.

"People are more able to talk about the fact they had a baby die or a miscarriage," said Terri McCaffrey, a clinical nurse specialist in charge of the St. Cloud Hospital Women's & Children's Center bereavement and pediatric palliative care program, in place since the late 1980s. "It's not covered up like it was 30 or 40 years ago.

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Regions Hospital offers chaplain services to families and has an annual remembrance service for families who've lost a loved one in the previous year. Families of stillborns are offered a memory box to store a lock of hair, footprint and other memories.

They can also have photographs taken of the baby, a spokesman said.

An Associated Press review of news coverage in recent years found accounts of a dozen similar incidents from 1996 through 2009 at hospitals across the U.S. and Canada. Some cases led to legal action.

The AP search found several other cases where remains of stillborn babies were allegedly lost, discarded in the trash, disposed of without the family's knowledge or kept indefinitely.

Minneapolis attorney Ron Meshbesher said he had not heard of a similar case in his decades of practicing law.

Depending on the circumstances, Meshbesher said, the parents might have a claim for emotional distress. "I think most people would be very upset by it," he said.

St. Paul police said they were investigating the Regions case with the Ramsey County medical examiner's office and Red Wing police.

Pioneer Press staff writers Joseph Lindberg, Emily Gurnon and Christopher Snowbeck contributed to this report, which includes information from the Associated Press.

"We are really sorry and saddened that this event happened," said Chris Boese, Chief Nursing Office and Vice President of Patient Care at Regions Hospital, during a news conference at the hospital in St. Paul, Minn., on Wednesday, April 17, 2013. Boese was speaking about an incident wher the remains of a baby that was stillborn at the hospital were mistakenly sent to a commercial laundry, something the hospital says has never happened there before. At right is Director of Communications Vince Rivard.
(Pioneer Press: Ben Garvin)